Buteni Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jewish settlement in Buteni is documented from the mid-nineteenth century. Bejan Frățilă's monograph says the first synagogue was built in 1863, when the community was already doing well, and that its members spoke Hungarian but were accepted without difficulty by the Romanian majority. They also founded their own bank, in which many Romanians who had come back from America deposited their savings. The monograph says that during the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 Hungarian troops entering Buteni from the direction of Arad and Chișineu-Criș looted the village, took all the money from the Jewish bank and wrecked its premises. The census figures quoted by the Cemetery Discovery Project are 125 Jews in 1880 and 152 in 1910. Andrei Popper describes 15 to 20 families, a Jewish elementary school that worked until 1943, and an influx of Orthodox Jews from Maramureș in the mid-1920s which ended the Neolog majority. His father, Alexandru Popper, a lawyer, was president of the community before the Second World War. The Orthodox cemetery, dating from the early nineteenth century, lies at the northern exit of the village towards Arad.

Architecture and design

Almost nothing is known about the building's architecture. The only description is Bejan Frățilă's remark that the second synagogue was 'much more elevated' than the first of 1863, which may mean larger, finer or more ambitious in design; the Romanian word does not settle which. Andrei Popper calls the village's Neolog synagogue 'beautiful', but it is not certain that he and the monograph mean the same building, since the community had two synagogues and Popper speaks of a change in the congregation's character in the mid-1920s rather than of a new building. The date of construction of the second synagogue, its builder, materials, size, seating capacity, plan and interior arrangement are all unknown. No photograph, postcard, plan or drawing of either Buteni synagogue was found in the collections searched, which included Hungarian postcard databases and image collections. The location of the plot within the village is also unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Little is recorded about religious life in the synagogue. Andrei Popper describes Buteni's congregation as Neolog, that is, belonging to the moderate reform current of Hungarian Jewry, until about 1924 or 1925. At that time a number of Jews moved to the village from Maramureș, in the north of Romania, and the Orthodox became the larger group, which would have changed the character of services. The community supported a Jewish elementary school, one of several in the county that Popper names alongside those of Arad and Șimand, and it kept the school open until 1943. Before the First World War the school's headmistress was a woman named Popper, not related to the interviewee's family. Alexandru Popper served as president of the community in the interwar years. No rabbi, cantor or ritual slaughterer of Buteni is named in any source found, and nothing is known of the synagogue's furnishings or of any inscription it bore.

Destruction

The sources record no attack on the building during the Second World War; Buteni remained part of Romania. After the war almost no Jews remained in the village, and the building was sold and pulled down, but the sources disagree on when and on whose authority. Andrei Popper, who served as a judge and court president in Ineu, told Centropa in the early 2000s that in 1945 or 1946 the Federation in Bucharest ordered the synagogues of towns with no or very few Jews to be demolished, and that 'the synagogue in Buteni had to be pulled down too, and the land was sold'. Bejan Frățilă's monograph says the building was sold 'around the 1960s' and demolished. A 2023 Adevărul article on nearby Pecica dates a demolition order for all synagogues in Arad county to 1970, under a directive of Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen covering places where no Jews lived, with the land to be sold. None of these sources names the buyer or who carried out the demolition.

The community’s fate

Arad county remained under Romanian rule throughout the Second World War, so the Jews of Buteni were not deported in the Hungarian deportations of 1944. They were, however, removed from the village in 1941, when under the Antonescu regime's anti-Jewish laws Jews were evacuated from the villages and small towns of the region and concentrated in Arad; a JewishGen database of the 1942 Arad census attributes the growth of the city's Jewish population to this forced concentration. Andrei Popper's parents moved back to Arad at that time and lived there until 1944. The Jewish school, according to Popper, kept going until 1943. How many Buteni Jews survived the war, and how many returned to the village, is unknown. Popper's father later went back to Buteni and died there in 1968, but no organised community is recorded after the war, and by the time of the Cemetery Discovery Project survey no Jews lived in the village.

The site today

The synagogue's plot has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not known what stands there today. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder in the centre of Buteni, on the main road (DN79A) beside the village museum, and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The Jewish cemetery survives at the northern edge of the village on the road to Arad: it is walled, partly overgrown, holds between 100 and 500 gravestones with Hebrew and Hungarian inscriptions, and is owned by the national Jewish community and looked after through the Jewish Community of Arad. Locating the synagogue plot would need the village's cadastral records or the manuscript monographs of Buteni by Pavel Galea and Ștefan Lungu cited by Bejan Frățilă.

Notable names